A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

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Thursday, November 30, 2017

As I continued my excavation of my file drawer of
unpublished papers, I came upon a 6,500 essay entitled “Exploitation and
Surplus Labor,” which I had quite forgotten writing. It is clearly a working paper that led to my
1981 journal article, “A Critique and Reinterpretation of Marx’s Labor Theory
of Value,” which is archived in box.net, accessible via a link at the top of
this blog. The 1981 journal article,
which I have just re-read, is, I think, the technically most advanced thing I
have every written about Marx, and I flatter myself that it is entirely
original and even, dare I say it, important.
But I made the tactical mistake of publishing it in Philosophy and Public Affairs.
That journal was read principally by philosophers, most of whom were not
equipped to understand the long stretches of linear algebra that I employ in
making my argument. As a result [or so I
like to tell myself] it has received no attention at all by serious students of
the thought of Marx. The working paper has
no math in it at all to speak of but it explores many of the same themes and
ideas.

I don’t suppose there is anything I can do to thrust my
journal article into modern discussions of Marx. Should anyone want to read it, it lies ready
in Box.net. As for the working paper, I scanned and
converted it without success, but as a .pdf file it is easily readable. I have uploaded the .pdf file to box under
the title “Marx Working Paper,” and if anyone wishes to read it, I would be
very interested in reactions or comments.

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

The
announced aim of Kant's moral philosophy, as stated most clearly and
unambiguously in the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals,
is to discover unconditionally valid principles of practical reason. Kant
conceives his task as falling into three parts, exactly corresponding to the
three Sections of the Foundations. First, he must identify and state the Moral
Law, the highest principle of practical reason, by which all rational agents,
merely in virtue of being rational agents, are bound. Secondly, he must demonstrate that the Highest
Moral Principle can be derived, entirely a priori, from a conceptual analysis
of Practical Reason. Finally, in light of the teaching of the First Critique,
Kant must connect up his conclusions concerning the principles guiding the
choices of rational agents with our experience of ourselves as causally
determined beings in the realm of appearance.

In sum,
then, the Foundations attempts to identify and state the principle governing the
actions of rational agents; to derive that principle from an a priori analysis
of rational agency, thereby proving that all rational agents, simply in virtue
of their rational agency, necessarily act out of respect for that principle;
and to demonstrate that we, as conditioned beings in the realm of appearance,
must act as though we know ourselves to be rational agents, even though such
knowledge is, strictly speaking, unavailable to us.

It is, of
course, a matter of considerable controversy whether Kant succeeds in achieving
all three, or indeed any, of these goals. The first is the least controversial,
for it merely involves showing that Kant and his audience of North Prussian
Pietists share a belief in a particularly rigoristic formalism. The achievement
of the third goal, involving as it does the entire complex metaphysical and
epistemological theoretical structure of the First Critique, is best left to one
side in a discussion such as this. But the second of Kant's undertakings
warrants our closest attention, for it is here that we find the greatest
controversy arising among students of Kant's moral philosophy.

The
controversy surrounding Kant's derivation of the Categorical Imperative
concerns not the validity of the derivation but its significance. Many students
of Kant's philosophy, and more broadly many students of moral and political
philosophy, will readily grant that some principle of formal consistency of
willing can be derived a priori from
an analysis of agency and rationality as such. What makes Kant's moral theory so
controversial, especially in regard to his second undertaking, is the
extraordinary claim that the purely a priori formal principle of consistency in
willing is sufficient to identify, from among the host of possible moral rules,
just those which reason commands, and which therefore constitute the substance
of morality.

Kant
actually tries three times in the Foundations to establish the universal
validity of unconditional moral principles. The first attempt is the famous
four examples of the Categorical Imperative.
Kant's arguments against suicide and self-indulgent laziness are
hopelessly inadequate. Both make explicit and utterly unjustified appeal to the
supposed objective natural purpose of some human capacity or psychological
tendency. The argument concerning ungenerosity is rather interesting, but it is
ultimately inadequate. For a variety of reasons, most scholarly and philosophical
attention has focused on the second argument, concerning false promising.

The
standard reconstruction of the false promising example, with which I entirely
agree, is to construe promising as a social practice defined by a system of
implicit, but clearly understood, rules, among which rather prominently featured
is a rule against false promising. On this view, when I utter the words "I
promise" in the appropriate social context, I am implicitly endorsing, or
committing myself to, or willing, in Kant's language, the entire system of
rules that constitute the practice of promising. But it takes only a little
reflection to recognize that the injunction against false promising is not
actually a categorical substantive moral command. Rather, it is hypothetical in
form. What Kant's argument, suitably reconstructed, demonstrates is that false
promising is incompatible with the practice of promise-making, from which it
follows that we must, in all consistency, choose either not to endorse,
participate in, and commit ourselves to the practice of promising or else choose
not to make false promises. But there is nothing in Kant's argument to dissuade
us from forswearing the institution of promising altogether. The crucial point
is that Kant has no plausible a priori
argument in support of the claim that a rational agent will necessarily enter
into the practice of promising, or more generally into whatever overarching
practice is implicit in the truthful use of language, from which the obligation
in particular to participate in the practice of promise-making might be
derived. In effect, Kant is at this point in his exposition unwittingly
assuming that the agents of whom he is speaking have some minimal commitment to
honorable social interaction with which, as he quite rightly argues, false
promising is logically incompatible. To the thorough reprobate who simply
rejects such a commitment, however, Kant has no valid objection.

Thus,
Kant's first two attempts to extract substantive moral principles from his purely
formal analysis of rational willing fail because of two fundamental problems:
First, his failure to demonstrate that rational agents have a standing,
unconditional obligation to enter into, or participate in, rule-governed social
practices in the context of which the notion of contradictory willing can be
fleshed out and given substance; and Second, his failure to identify obligatory
ends, adoption of which follows necessarily from the mere fact of being a
rational agent, and the existence of which would, in a different but equivalent
way, provide substantial content for the purely formal principle of consistency
in willing. Kant's third attempt in the Foundations is directed precisely at
compensating for both of these failures - namely, his invocation of the social
contract tradition of political theory under the guise of what he calls a
"Realm of Ends."

By
"realm" I understand the systematic union of different rational
beings through common laws. Because laws determine ends with regard to their
universal validity, if we abstract from the personal difference of rational
beings and thus from all content of their private ends, we can think of a whole
of all ends in systematic connection, a whole of rational beings as ends in
themselves as well as of the particular ends that each may set for himself.
This is a realm of ends, which is possible on the aforesaid principles. For all
rational beings stand under the law that each of them should treat himself and
all others never merely as means but in every case also as an end in himself.
Thus there arises a systematic union of rational beings through common
objective laws. This is a realm that may be called a realm of ends (certainly
only an ideal), because what these laws have in view is just the relation of these
beings to each other as ends and means.

A rational being belongs to the realm
of ends as a member when he gives universal laws in it while also himself
subject to these laws. He belongs to it as sovereign when he, as legislating,
is subject to the will of no other. The rational being must regard himself
always as legislative in a realm of ends possible through the freedom of the
will, whether he belongs to it as member or as sovereign. He cannot maintain
the latter position merely through the maxims of his will but only when he is a
completely independent being without need and with power adequate to his will.

Morality,
therefore, consists in the relation of every action to that legislation through
which alone a realm of ends is possible. It must be able to arise from his
will, whose principle then is to take no action according to any maxim which
would be inconsistent with its being a universal law and thus to act only so
that the will through its maxims could regard itself at the same time as universally
lawgiving.

This
language is, of course, a direct echo of Rousseau's characterization of the
republic brought into existence by the social contract. It specifies the
procedure by which a collection of self-interested individuals can transform
themselves into a republic by entering into the mutual agreement referred to as
a social contract.

At the
close of the Foundations, despite Kant's introduction of the evocative notion
of humanity as an end in itself, and his invocation of a Rousseauean conception
of a republic regulated by a social contract, we are left with the two problems
outlined earlier: First, how to demonstrate that rational agents as such must,
in all consistency, enter into collective agreements that establish structures
of social practices in the context of which substantial meaning can be given to
the notion of contradictory willing; and Second, how to demonstrate that
rational agents who have thus constituted themselves a realm of ends or
republic will, qua rational, arrive
at a single universal, necessary, and therefore objective set of substantive
laws as the content of their collective rational willing.

Kant's most
successful attempt to solve these two problems appears not in the Foundations
but in the Metaphysics o f Morals for which the earlier work is intended
as a foundation or groundwork. Before turning to that text, however, it might
be worth pausing for a moment to observe the relationship between the
unresolved problems just stated and the work of the most prominent contemporary
political theorist, John Rawls. In his widely read work, A Theory of Justice,
Rawls undertakes to demonstrate that rationally self-interested individuals,
placed in a situation designed to mimic that of noumenal agents, will necessarily
choose to commit themselves to a set of general principles regulating the basic
structure of any society of which they may be members. By virtue of the
conditions of deliberation - characterized fancifully by Rawls as consisting in
a "veil of ignorance" - the choices made by these individuals will be
universal and necessary, hence objective, and will at the same time be
sufficiently specific to yield substantive social imperatives.

Rawls'
treatment differs fundamentally from that of Kant, of course, inasmuch as Rawls
posits rationally self-interested, which is to say in Kant's language
heteronymous, individuals. Nevertheless,
as Rawls has refined and revised his theory, he has moved more and more in the
direction of a Kantian reinterpretation of his central ideas. Rawls' theory is
a good deal more technically sophisticated than Kant's, involving as it does
notions drawn from modern neo-classical economic theory and the branch of
mathematics known as Game Theory. But, not surprisingly, Kant's theory is a
great deal more profound than Rawls', for whereas Rawls posits a society of
rationally self-interested agents, thereby giving up entirely any attempt to
identify unconditional principles of morality, Kant holds firm to the idea of
rational agents as such, abstracting even from their self-interest, and
appealing only to what can be derived from their character as agents, which is
to say from the fact that they possess practical reason.

II. The
Resolution of the Problem in the Rechtslehre

It is in
Part I of the Metaphysics of Morals, the "Theory of Right" or
"Theory of Justice" [Rechtslehre] that Kant finally mounts a
full-scale frontal assault on the problems left unresolved at the end of the
Foundations. This fact - assuming for a moment that my reading of the situation
is correct - has a very interesting significance. Contrary to Kant's own
conception of the relationship between his moral and political theory, it would
appear that they are not separate and co-equal branches of the Metaphysics of
Morals. Rather, they are a single integrated theory, in which the central
thesis of the political theory is required to complete the argument of the
moral theory. In this regard, it is suggestive to compare Kant both with
Rousseau, who influenced him, and with Rawls, whom he in turn influenced.

Kant begins
the Rechtslehre by introducing the concept of justice. In a section entitled
"What is Justice?" he writes:

The
concept of justice, insofar as it relates to an obligation corresponding to it
(that is, the moral concept of justice), applies [only under the following
conditions]. First, it applies only to the external and - what is more -
practical relationship of one person to another in which their actions can
exert an influence on each other (directly or indirectly). Second, the concept
applies only to the relationship of a will to another person's will, not to his
wishes or desires (or even just his needs), which are the concern of acts of
benevolence and charity. Third, the concept of justice does not take into consideration
the matter of the will, that is, the end that a person intends to accomplish by
means of the object that he wills; for example, we do not ask whether someone
who buys wares from me for his own business will profit from the transaction.
Instead, in applying the concept of justice we take into consideration only the
form of the relationship between the wills insofar as they are regarded as
free, and whether the action of one of them can be conjoined with the freedom
of the other in accordance with a universal law.

Justice
is therefore the aggregate of those conditions under which the will of one
person can be conjoined with the will of another in accordance with a universal
law of freedom.

Thus, as Kant states two paragraphs later, "the
universal law of justice is: act externally in such a way that the free use of
your will is compatible with the freedom of everyone according to a universal
law."

Kant
glosses this, almost immediately, as follows:

[T]he concept of justice can be held to
consist immediately of the possibility of the conjunction of universal
reciprocal coercion with the freedom of everyone. Just as justice in general
has as its object only what is external in actions, so strict justice, inasmuch
as it contains no ethical elements, requires no determining grounds of the will
besides those that are purely external, for only then is it pure and not
confused with any prescriptions of virtue.

There are a
number of problems in Kant's doctrine here, arising principally from his insistence
on speaking as though the distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal [or
the internal and the external, as he puts it here] can actually be drawn within
experience. All such claims, implicit or otherwise, are, of course, strictly
incompatible with the teaching of the First Critique. The real difficulty for my present purposes
is the fact that this conception of justice as justified universal reciprocal
coercion does not provide the unconditional a priori substantive content for
moral principles for which we are searching.

The
problem, very simply, is that despite the appearance of Kant's formulation,
which is cast in categorical language, the injunction is still hypothetical. IF
you choose to coerce others, THEN you yourself must submit to a like coercion.
Note, by the way, that it is as yet unclear how narrowly this injunction
constrains us, even should we choose to coerce. It would appear that there is a
very wide range of reciprocal coercions compatible with the injunction,
including some that Kant would presumably not find attractive. For example,
would his principle be compatible with a system of laws that authorizes blood
feuds and duels?

But even if
Kant can demonstrate that a group of individuals, by committing themselves to
the fundamental principle of justice, thereby so severely constrain their
subsequent legislative choices that only a single system of laws is compatible
with that principle, that system will still have a merely hypothetical status,
for it will command only those who have chosen to enter into the social
contract. What Kant needs - what he has needed from the very start - is an
argument designed to show that failure to enter a social contract can only
issue from an internal contradiction in willing. In short, Kant must show that
a rational agent as such necessarily seeks to enter into a social contract, and
does so as soon as possible.

To return
for a moment to the failed example of false promising from the Foundations,
if Kant could show that the institution of promising is required by the
fundamental principle of justice [not, one would imagine, too difficult a
task], and if Kant could also show that a rational agent as such necessarily
enters a social contract, then he could conclude that rational agents as such
are not only, in all consistency, required by mere reason alone to keep such
promises as they make, but that they are also required, by the dictates of a
priori reason, to adopt the practice of promise-making. He then really could
conclude, as he wishes to, that false promising is an example of contradictory
willing all the way down.

I do not
believe that Kant accomplishes these extraordinary tasks. If I did, I would, in
all consistency, forthwith embrace his ethical theory. But I think I can show
that he makes an extremely imaginative stab at the second of them in the Rechtslehre,
where, as I shall suggest, he advances an argument designed to show that we
have an unconditional obligation to enter a social contract.

The key to
his argument is the concept of property.

An object is mine de jure (meum juris) if I
am so bound to it that anyone else who uses it without my consent thereby
injures me. The subjective condition of the possibility of the use of an object
is possession.

An
external thing is mine, however, only if I can assume that it is still possible
for me to be injured by someone else's use of the thing even when it is not in
my possession. Consequently, there would be a self-contradiction in the concept
of possession if it did not have two meanings, namely sensible possession and
intelligible possession- Sensible possession means the physical possession of
an object, whereas intelligible possession means the purely de jure possession
of the same object.

Kant goes on to discuss the distinction between sensible and
intelligible possession in ways that are thoroughly problematic, involving as
they seem to the legitimacy of a distinction between the phenomenal and the
noumenal within experience. We can leave that difficulty aside for our
purposes, for it is of course the concept of intelligible possession, or
possession de jure, that is relevant.
Almost immediately, Kant states what he calls the Juridical Postulate of
Practical Reason, which asserts that "it must be possible to have any and
every external object of my will as my property." In other words, as Kant explains, "a
maxim according to which, if it were made into a law, an object of will would
have to be in itself (objectively) ownerless (res nullius) conflicts with Law
and justice.”

Before
analyzing how Kant justifies this postulate, and uses it to accomplish his
fundamental aim in his moral theory, it is worth pausing to remind ourselves
just what is being claimed here, for a great deal of contemporary importance is
at stake. It is not too much to say that Kant is here laying the groundwork for
the refutation of all manner of environmentalist and ecological doctrines, as
well as a number of nationalist doctrines based upon a conception of the
objectively privileged territory, homeland, or place of a people. Kant himself,
of course, is looking backward, not forward. His intention is to destroy the
last vestiges of feudalism, and lay the groundwork for a thoroughly rational
commodification of natural objects.

What the
principle says is that anything can, in principle, be someone's possession.
There is nothing unownable. It does not follow, needless to say, that
everything is actually owned; only that there is nothing - no tree, no river,
no plot of land, no species of animal or plant, no planet, no solar system -
that by its nature resists ownership, that is such that it cannot be the
rightful possession of some individual or group of individuals. And possession
here implies rightful use of the possessed thing, by the owner, in pursuit of
the owner's purposes, and also alienation or legal transfer of the possession
of the possessed thing to another rational agent.

Needless to
say, this conception flies in the face of the pre-capitalist traditions against
which Kant is arguing. To suggest that the Earl of Northumberland owns
Northumberland, and can sell it to the King of France, should he choose, is
fundamentally to undermine the notion of hereditary family possession implied
in the familiar allusion to the Earl as simply "Northumberland," as
in one of Shakespeare's plays. Donald Trump, on the other hand, can perfectly
well sell the Trump Shuttle to Delta, should he find himself a bit short of
cash.

In a more
modern vein, any suggestion that the human race stands in a symbiotic, or
fiduciary, or other moral relationship to nature is completely incompatible
with Kant's Postulate. Equally incompatible, of course, is any form of
religious or quasi-religious privileging of species or things other than the
human species or other species of rational agents, should they exist. In the
coin of Kant's Realm of Ends, the principle "Treat humanity always as an
end, and never simply as a means" is inscribed on the obverse. On the
reverse, however, is found the correlative principle, "Anything else may
be treated as a means only."

Kant now
offers an extremely strong interpretation of the concept of intelligible
possession. "A thing is externally mine," he says, "if it is
such that any prevention of my use of it would constitute an injury to me even
if it is not in my possession (that is, I am not the holder of the
object)." What Kant is speaking of here, as he indicates immediately, is
intelligible possession, or de jure
possession. The language might lead us to conclude that Kant is deliberately
trying to construct a justification for the most thoroughgoingly unregulated
period of capitalist expansion, but that would be a trifle hasty, I think.
Kant's Postulate is perfectly compatible with positive legislation to constrain
the ways in which property owners deal with their property - zoning laws, and
so forth. What the Postulate says is that all such laws must be acts of a
legislature constituted by a social contract. They cannot be deduced,
independently of legitimate legislation, from the nature of the objects themselves.
It is not that an owner must be allowed to do with his or her property whatever
he or she wills, but that such freedom must at least be possible, in order for
there to be de jure possession.

Having
defined the concept of de jure
possession, Kant immediately makes what is for him, by this late stage in the
unfolding of his system, an entirely predictable move. He asks for a deduction
of the concept of purely de jure
possession of an external object [what he calls, parenthetically, possessio noumenon). That is to say, he
seeks to show that the concept finds legitimate employment, indeed must find
legitimate employment, within the realm of experience.

Put as
simply and clearly as I am able, Kant's argument for the possibility of de jure possession is this: Since I am a
phenomenal being - since I am, in other words, a rational agent that manifests
its agency in the realm of appearance - my will at least potentially requires
the cooperation of nature for the fulfillment of its purposes, whatever they may
turn out to be. Even if I adopt the extreme stoicism of an Epictetus, seeking
only virtue and not the powers or pleasures of the world, nevertheless I shall
find myself compelled to employ some portions of nature as means to my ends.

But the laws of nature are such that I can use a portion of
nature as a means to my ends only by appropriating it, and thereby excluding
others from a like appropriation of those same portions. In short, for the
accomplishment of what I will, for the enactment of my maxims, I require
property.

Were I an
incorporeal being, not manifesting my agency in space and time, I might have
neither the need for, nor indeed the possibility of, property. Imagine, for
example, that I were merely a noumenal
rational agent whose acts consisted in the contemplation of pure ideas or the
endless elaboration of the relationships among abstract logical constructs. In that case, my appropriation of modus ponens or the law of the excluded
middle would in no way exclude others, for the contemplation of a timeless
truth of logic does not require that others be denied its use or enjoyment. But
because we are phenomenal beings whose agency is manifested in space and time,
my appropriation at least potentially excludes you.

Kant's
argument thus far can be summarized in a series of conditionals, preceded by a
declarative assertion that comes as close as he thinks possible to the flat
claim that I am a rational agent. The argument looks like this:

1. Insofar as I
act, I must assume, though I cannot know it, that I am a rational agent, which
is to say, that I am free. [This is the conclusion of the Third Section of the
Foundations.]

2. If I am a
rational agent, then willing an end, I necessarily will the means. [This, Kant
has persuasively argued in the Second Section of the Foundations, is analytic.]

3. If I will
the means to the fulfillment of my ends, then, as a phenomenal being - one
whose agency is manifested in the realm of appearance - I must legitimately
appropriate, which is to say take de jure
possession of - portions of the spatiotemporal realm as means.

4. If I must
take de jure possession of some
portion of the spatio-temporal realm as means, then it must be possible for me
to do so. What is more, there must be, in principle, no portion of the natural
world that it is not possible for me to possess, inasmuch as there is nothing
in the nature of willing as such that places limits on what might, according to
the laws of nature, serve as means to my ends.

From all of
which it follows that de jure
possession must be possible.

The question remains, however: How is de jure possession possible? What is required for such legitimate
possession to be actual? Locke, of
course, had begged this question in the Second Treatise of Government by
simply asserting the right of property as a truth revealed by the natural light
of reason. But Kant, correctly in my view, recognizes that this is a radically
unsatisfactory grounding for the right of property. Instead, like both Hobbes
and Rousseau before him, Kant grounds the right to property in a prior mutual
agreement, or social contract, among all those who, in the pursuit of their
ends, may come into conflict with one another in the appropriation of portions
of nature.

Legitimate
ownership involves the exclusion of others from the use and enjoyment of a
portion of nature, an exclusion that may be instituted by force if necessary.
Such a use of force, Kant argues, if in all consistency universalized, entails
mutual constraints among all the members of a society - where society here can
be understood quite simply as the totality of persons who, in the pursuit of
their ends, are likely to interfere with one another. So Kant concludes that
the possibility of property entails the existence of a social contract.

And now
Kant concludes his argument in a strikingly bold and imaginative fashion. The
central text is §8 of the First Chapter of the First Part of the Rechtslehre.
Here it is in its entirety:

When
I declare (by word or deed), "I will that an external thing shall be
mine," I thereby declare it obligatory for everyone else to refrain from
the object of my will. This is an obligation that no one would have apart from
this juridical act of mine. Included in this claim, however, is an
acknowledgment of being reciprocally bound to everyone else to a similar and
equal restraint with respect to what is theirs. The obligation involved here
comes from a universal rule of the external juridical relationship [that is,
says the translator, the civil society]. Consequently, I am not bound to leave
what is another's untouched if everyone else does not in turn guarantee to

me with regard to what is mine that he
will act in accordance with exactly the same principle. This guarantee does not
require a special juridical act, but is already contained in the concept of
being externally bound to a duty on account of the universality, and hence also
the reciprocity, of an obligation coming from a universal rule.

Now,
with respect to an external and contingent possession, a unilateral Will cannot
serve as a coercive law for everyone, since that would be a violation of
freedom in accordance with universal laws. Therefore, only a Will binding
everyone else - that is, a collective, universal (common), and powerful Will -
is the kind of Will that can provide the guarantee required. The condition of
being subject to general external (that is, public) legislation that is backed
by power is the civil society. Accordingly, a thing can be externally yours or
mine only in a civil society.

[And now, Kant concludes with a
dramatic flourish:]

Conclusion:
If it must be de jure possible to
have an external object as one's own, then the subject must also be allowed to
compel everyone else with whom he comes into conflict over the question of whether
such an object is his to enter, together with him, a society under a civil
constitution.

The
conclusion of the argument prior to this point, you will recall, was that de jure possession must be possible, or,
as Kant puts it in the text before us, "it must be de jure possible to have an external object as one's own."
Combining this with the conclusion of the argument just quoted, we can now
conclude that it must be allowed to compel others to enter with one into a
society under a civil constitution. Since this necessity is universal, it of
course follows that others have an equal right to compel me to enter civil
society.

We can now
see that in the text of the Rechtslehre, Kant finally provides
what was missing from the argument of the Foundations, namely a demonstration
that such obligations as faithful promising are not hypothetically, but are
rather categorically, imperative.

Kant's
argument is open to criticism at every stage, of course, though it is
nonetheless, in my estimation, extremely interesting. Before sketching some of
those criticisms, let me call attention once again to an implication of the
argument that goes directly counter to the most common impression concerning
Kant's ethical theory. Kant is generally viewed as a rigorist, an objectivist,
a universalist, a theorist who claims to be able to demonstrate a priori the
universal validity of very powerful moral principles that are binding on all
agents regardless of their nature or circumstances. And this impression is
quite correct. But readers of Kant almost always draw the natural conclusion
that he believes these moral principles to be binding on us even in the absence
of a legitimately established state. In the familiar language of liberal
political theory, Kant is seen as siding with Locke on the question whether the
moral law is binding on agents in a state of nature. But it should now be clear
that Kant's argument actually entails the opposite conclusion. The procedural
obligation to enter into a social contract is certainly binding upon agents in
a state of nature, but the moral principles enacted into law by the Legislature
of a state thus established are binding only after, and on the condition of,
the establishment of the legitimate state.

Kant
clearly does not intend this consequence of his moral theory. Quite to the
contrary. But his failure to provide a satisfactory theory of obligatory ends
forces anyone wishing to embrace his moral theory to rely upon the legislation
of the legitimate state as the only source of morally binding substantive
principles of practical reason.

And this
leads us ineluctably to the question sketched above, whether a legitimately
established state, based upon a unanimous social contract and committed to
embodying the fundamental principle of justice in its laws, is thereby
constrained to a single structure of justice that thus constitutes the
objective, universal, unconditionally binding system of principles of practical
reason? This, I take it, is essentially
the question originally posed by John Rawls in the earlier versions of his
theory, before he drained it of its force and interest by an endless series of
ad hoc adjustments, concessions, baroque elaborations, and qualifications.

If the
answer to the question is yes - if, let us say, a legitimately established
republic of rational agents in search of principles compatible with the
fundamental postulate of justice must necessarily come upon and agree to Rawls'
Two Principles of Justice - then by combining Kant's argument and Rawls', we
would have a very powerful defense indeed of a universal system of moral
principles. The argument, in a nutshell, would go like this:

1. Rationality
as such entails consistent willing.

2. Consistent
willing, for a phenomenally appearing agent, entails the possibility of
property.

3. The
possibility of property entails the necessity of establishing a state through a
social contract.

4. A legitimate
state composed of rational agents will necessarily enact one and only one set
of fundamental principles of justice, namely the Two Principles of Justice.

5. Therefore,
we are all, as phenomenally appearing rational agents, obligated universally
and unconditionally to form legitimately grounded political communities with
those with whom we come into contact, and in those communities to enact the Two
Principles of Justice as the fundamental laws governing our interactions.

There are
three stages in this argument: the derivation of the requirement of consistent
willing from an analysis of what it is to be an agent; the deduction of the
necessity of entering a social contract from an analysis of the preconditions
of property; and the demonstration that reason dictates one and only one system
of principles as the content of a legitimate state.

My own view
is that the first stage in the argument, which as I have indicated we find in
the pivotal portion of the Second Section of the Foundations, is
essentially sound. To be an agent is to be moved by reasons, and the logic of
reasons requires consistency of willing. What counts as a good reason for me
necessarily counts as a good reason for any agent in relevantly similar
circumstances.

The third
stage of the argument, I am convinced, is mistaken. Neither Rawls nor anyone
else has, to my knowledge, made a convincing case for the claim that free and
equal rational agents must, insofar as they are rational, coordinate on a
single system of substantive principles regulating their interactions with one
another.

It is the
second stage that I find especially interesting, in part, I confess, because I
have managed to make it clear to myself only recently. Can the material
circumstances of human existence - our spatio-temporality, our dependence for
the pursuit of our ends on inanimate nature - ground an argument that we have a
standing procedural obligation to attempt rational community with those agents
with whom we interact? Can we, as Kant

claims, compel such rational community?

I think we
can conclude immediately that we cannot compel others to enter with us in a
social contract, for the essence of such an agreement is that it represents
mutual willing, and that implies that it is voluntary. But am I required,
simply by the constraints of rational consistency, to seek such community with
others, or is it consistent with my status as an agent to adopt nothing more
than an instrumental stance vis-a-vis those with whom I interact? Is this,
after all, the real content of the injunction to treat humanity as an end and
not simply as a means?

I honestly
don't know. My pre-philosophical inclination is to believe that the answer is
yes, that there is something about construing myself as a rational agent that
requires me, in all consistency, to attempt to achieve rational community with
others whom I consider to be agents as well - though I do not consider myself
bound, should they reject that attempt, to treat them as I would have agreed to
treat and be treated, had we actually achieved rational community. But at this
point, I do not see an argument that can make that conclusion plausible.

In the past few days, I have posted here an exchange between two people named R. Wolff about the proper interpretation of the theories of Karl Marx. That was of interest, I hope, to the readers of this blog for whom Marx is an important figure. I should like now to post something even longer that will, I also hope, be of interest to readers of this blog for whom Kant is a major figure. Some words of explanation are called for.I began my career as a student of Kant's philosophy. Eventually I published two original books about Kant's thought [and several edited books, but they do not count.] The first dealt with the arguments of the Critique of Pure Reason. The second was a commentary on the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. I found in the First Critique what I believed to be a coherent, connected argument for Kant's central thesis, namely that the validity of the Causal Maxim can be derived from the premise: "The 'I Think' attaches to all my representations." In my own mind, if not that of my readers, my first book on Kant was thus a success.But I struggled for years to find an argument in the Groundwork that could be construed, however generously, as a coherent defense of the claim that the Moral Law is unconditionally binding on all rational agents as such. In the end, therefore, I thought of my second book as a failure.Many years later, while reading a work I had always considered one of Kant's lesser productions, namely the Metaphysics of Morals, I more or less stumbled on an argument by Kant that I believed finally went a long way to completing the unsatisfactory argument of the Groundwork. By this point [the late 1990s] I had long since stopped publishing in Philosophy journals or in other ways participating in the social life of the profession. I had even transferred to an Afro-American Studies Department where I was happily running a doctoral program in that field. So I wrote up what I had found and put it away in my file drawer of unpublished essays. Some while later, I was invited to contribute an original essay to a volume to be called Autonomy and Community: Readings in Contemporary Social Philosophy, edited by Jane Keller and Sidney Axinn. The volume was published by the State University of New York Press in 1998 and, so far as I know, was read by virtually no one.Which is, in a way, unfortunate, because I think my essay was a really significant contribution to the scholarship on Kant's moral philosophy.So I am going to post it here on my blog. Who knows? Maybe someone will finally read it.

Monday, November 27, 2017

And here is Rick Wolff's response. Note, the discrepancy in dates is probably my later error.

July 22,
1978

Dear Bob,

Very
seriously, we appreciate the evident time and energy and care contributed to the
letter you sent to us last month. It "engages" our work in a manner
directly useful in working out our formulations toward greater precision and
clarity. We only wish other graduate students and faculty would do likewise;
that would, of course, help us enormously.

This
letter addresses itself to the first and longer portion of your letter, that
pertaining to our usage of the Althusserian term,
"overdetermination." I hope that before too long, we will have some
thoughts down on paper regarding the second portion. I believe that it would be
best to begin by specifying what exact points in your letter and in Freud serve
me in replying to your letter; the following list should, then, serve as
reference points in the argument developed below.

1. First
paragraph, 5th and 6th lines: the two sciences business is not secondary or in
any way non-essential to our whole formulation. Your bracketing of that epistemological/methodological
position will, I intend to show, reappear as a constant problem within your arguments
over the interpretation of "overdetermination."

2. Second
paragraph, page 2: I do not agree at all with your rendering of Freud's meaning
by the term "overdetermination': Thus I will follow a very different,
opposed view of Freud’s meaning along a chain of reasoning eventuating in
further disagreements over Althusser's intent in developing the term “overdetermination";
over what a psychoanalysis does for a patient, and, perhaps most importantly,
over what I understand to be Marx's particular method of socio-economic
analysis which, I believe, may be usefully and accurately designated by the
summary term, "overdetermination."

*(My
references to Freud are still taken - as in our paper - from the Brill/modern
Library edition of Works)

3. The
opening pages of the chapter on "The Dream Work," and especially
pages 323-4, distinguish most importantly between the elements" of the
"dream content" and the "dream thoughts" which are
ascertained, as Freud puts it, after the dream has occurred by means of
psychoanalytically guided free association. The "elements" are nodal
points of interaction ("meeting" says Freud) among the ascertained
dream thoughts. I will argue that [it is?] just this point you have missed or
misinterpreted in your letter.

4. Freud,
page 341: “it is left to the interpretation of the dream to restore the coherence
which the dream-work (condensation, displacement, censorship, etc.) has destroyed." To be frustratingly
brief, my reading of Freud rules out any notion that one or another or any
sequentially considered set of dream thoughts could explain, let alone cause, a
particular dream content or any of its constituent elements. What is crucial is
the "meeting" of any 'n' dream thoughts in so particular a manner as
to precipitate - in a constructed interpretation - a correspondingly particular
nodal point or element of actual dream content. One dream thought thus could
not possibly serve to explain why one and not the other of its (the dream
thought s) elements surfaces within the dream content as an element of it. As I
read them, neither Freud nor Althusser operate with a notion of
overdetermination as articulated in your second paragraph, page two, i.e.,
several individually sufficient explanations.

To get at
this point in a different way, consider that any dream content is first
"ascertained" or remembered by the patient - certainly a process
involving some selectivity based in turn upon some generally defined mental
orientation of the patient. Similarly, dream thoughts are ascertained by the
subsequent speech -of the patient - a process involving again the general mental
orientation of the patient and the conditions obtaining during the interval
between dream and speech. What we have, then, to deal with are fragments of
dreams and fragments of thoughts elicited after and about those dreams.
Confronting this fragmentary collection of mental events, Freud proposes to
link dream
elements to dream thoughts in a precise manner which is not at all that
presented in your cited paragraph on page 2. It is a manner that assumes
multiple causality (or explanatory variables)—but goes well beyond multiplicity
to put the emphasis on the interaction between, the "meeting,” the
relationships among dream thoughts that produce or explain a dream element or
elements. Freud specifically says that several elements of dream thoughts
appear in a dream while others do not; thus, again, that one dream thought can
not explain either the dream in toto or the presence within it of some and not other
elements of the dream thoughts.

To
interpret a dream, to “explain” it, then, involves a complex interaction
between patient and psychoanalyst involving several levels of selectivity. The
patient selectively rem-embers dream content and selectively articulates dream
thoughts: The psychoanalyst selectively elicits and encourages the
articulations and probably also the remembrances of the patient. Together, patient
and doctor construct, according to Freud's proposed method, an interpretation
of dreams, i.e. together they construct a “coherent” dream content. (I do not
take seriously Freud's idea that interpretation “restores” coherence, since
there is no way to demonstrate or prove some original coherence.

NOW, there
are no doubt several or-perhaps many different “coherent” dream contents, i.e.
interpretations, that a patient with or without an analyst might construct
along the lines of Freud's proposed method. Presumably, an analyst can either
minimize or maximize the degree to which the analyst’s own preferred
construction is impressed upon the patient in the course of the patient’s own
effort at the construction of a coherence. At least formally, I believe psychoanalysis
aims at facilitating the patient's construction of a coherent dream content so
as to make the patient aware of his/her own manner of thinking (in the broadest
possible sense). This is how I understand Freud: constructing a coherent dream
content out of fragmentary dream elements and dream thoughts involves
principles of selectivity (what remembered, what is freely associated in speech,
what is thought “important" among remembrances and articulations of dream
thoughts) and a methodological principle, namely, linking dream contents to
dream thoughts via overdetermination.

All this
is preface to what, I think, really matters here. Althusser is interested in
Freud's methodological principle for two reasons. The first and less important
lies in its usefulness to combat the crude and reductionist economic
materialism that has become so pervasive among many elements in the Marxian
tradition. The more important reason lies in its usefulness in permitting
Althusser to formulate his notion of the distinctiveness of Marxian science.
Thus, for Althusser, social events are like dream contents in their immediate
lack of “coherence.” Historically considered conditions and developments within
the ideological and political, as well as economic, realms of social life are
like dream thoughts. The interaction, then, of these realms overdetermines social
events giving history a “coherence” much as interpretation gives “coherence” to
dreams. But, of course, no one realm can by itself give “coherence” (shades of
the rejected economism).

However,
Althusser goes well beyond Freud; it is only the latter's general idea he
absorbs. As you quite rightly noted, Althusser makes reciprocity among socially
causal realms or variables or forces central to his argument. He goes even
further to insist that each realm within the social totality is completely
constituted by as well as constitutive of every other designated realm. Thus
Althusser's overdetermination is a very significantly modified, extended, and,
I believe, deepened version of Freud's formulation vis a vis dreams.

Now to the
punch-line of all this: Althusser is most interested in the fact that, in
general, several "coherences" are constructible in either dream interpretation
or social analysis. The patient who with the analyst eventually constructs a
complex interaction of dream thoughts so as to produce a "coherent"
dream content gains from this process an insight into the basic methods of
his/her own mental processes: basic concepts, anxieties, fears, needs, etc. The
fruit of the analysis of the dream, its interpretation, is not some restored
coherence, but rather self-consciousness about ones own mental processes, i.e,
thinking broadly considered. A different patient, confronting quite similar
dreams contents and/or thoughts might well produce a quite different
construction expressing correspondingly different mental processes.

In the
social-analytical area [arena?], Althusser identifies Marxism as, simultaneously
and necessarily, a particular way of thinking about society (a social science)
and a correspondingly particular construction of what the "coherence"
of any place and time in history is. Operating within such a Marxism, Althusser
–identifies coherences and their constitutive sciences other than Marxism and
offers a Marxian scientific explanation for why and how these alternative
sciences exist, i.e. their overdetermination.

Given all
this, I hope the following brief responses to certain particular points you raised
will not be too unclear. Yes, Althusser's argument that Marxism approaches the
explanation (bringing “coherence” to) of any social event via overdetermination
asserts that the latter comprises an epistemological/methodological foundation
of distinctively Marxian science. Your concern with completeness I do not
understand. Neither the Interpretation of dreams nor of social events can ever
be complete because the constituent elements of the process of interpretation
are always changing, because the object of interpretation is always altered
(enhanced) self-consciousness which in turn works changes.in actions which
react back upon the thinking process and so on. Completeness would imply something
like Freud's notion of restoring coherence, which Althusser rejects for reasons
I indicated above as my own as well.

In any case,
Althusser certainly does support the notion that two or more well-developed
(never complete) sciences can and do offer alternative coherent explanations
for events. They do this operating out of different conceptual frameworks or
processes of thinking (including what is "seen” and "selected"
among infinitely fragmentary givens).

The
important distinction between a cause and an explanation is a huge issue of
central importance. We agree on that. Let me here simply say that Althusser
uses overdetermination as a method of explaining, all causes and effects
including the causes and effects of using overdetermination as a method for
social theory. At the same time, Althusser insists unwaveringly that a final
distinction always remains between an event (cause or effect) and the various
human explanations offered by it. (Here is perhaps a faint thread linking Marx
back to Kant).

As to your
idea of Althusser being interested in some parallel notion to free association,
I very much doubt it. The effort to draw such parallels lies rather with Althusser's
theoretical opponents within the Marxian-tradition, i.e. the Frankfurt school's
“critical” theorists and most evidently in the work of Habermas on knowledge
vis-a-vis human interests.

Althusser
insists that sciences deal with alternatively constructed meanings orr
coherences, that between all of these and “the real totality” there verneine [?] both a gap and a fundamental,
ceaseless-mutual determination: changing sciences (knowledges, understandings)
are a constituent element of the totality-they seek to grasp and thus the
changes in the real impact upon knowledges of the real and vice versa.
Althusser’s concept of Marx's dialectics focuses on the argument that
overdetermination implies/defines contradiction. But this letter will never
stop other than abruptly, given the many
points you raised explicitly and implicitly in your letter. Know much of what
I've written here must appear at best too dense. Well, we might continue to
exchange thoughts. Certainly I will go much further in specifying our meaning
in the term over-determination in future writings thanks to your letter and the
reflections it has stimulated. I very much hope this letter is of interest to
you.

Here, thanks to yeoman work by a reader, is my 1978 memo to Rick Wolff et al., beauifully cleaned up. Next, I will post their reply. Massive thanks to the reader.

11 June,
1977

Professor
Richard Wolff

Mr. Antonino
Callari

Mr. Bruce
Robert

Gentlemen
(and revered colleagues):

I have
read your fine paper, “Marxian and Ricardian Economics: Fundamental Differences,”
with great interest and profit. I found it enormously helpful to me, and in
considerable measure persuasive as regards the significant differences between
the theories of Ricardo and Marx. I am not convinced of the merits of the
rather high-powered methodological assumptions (regarding 'two sciences,' etc.)
through which you express your conclusions, but that is an issue that can
perhaps await exploration at a later date. In this communication, I should like
to focus my attention on two specific, but very fundamental, points. With
regard to the first, I believe that you have gone astray, philosophically; with
regard to the second, I believe that you are absolutely correct, but that your
case can be made stronger, in ways that I shall suggest. I am couching these
reflections in the form of a letter to you three, but I shall take the liberty
of circulating them more widely to other members of our community with similar
interests and concerns. I might say that availability of such a community is,
for me, an experience unique in my intellectual and professional career, and a
fringe benefit of incalculable value at UMass.

The two
points to which 1 shall address myself are these: First, your use of the term
"overdetermined," which I believe to be confused in non-trivial ways;
and Second, your discussion of the fundamental differences between Marx and the
Neo-Ricardians (and Ricardo himself) on the matter of the relationship between
circulation and production.

I.The
concept of Overdetermination

I believe
that you are using the term "overdetermined" in a way that deviates
both from the meaning of Freud, who introduced it into the literature, and also
(perhaps) front the meaning of Althusser, who acknowledges his debt to Freud,
and to whom you in turn acknowledge your debt. Now, ordinarily there is not
much to be gained front terminological quibbles. Many philosophers have taken
the position of the Caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, who, when he
used a word made it mean whatever he wished it to mean. Plato appears to have
begun this practice, and virtually every great philosopher since has followed
suit. Nevertheless, I intend to quibble about the meaning of the term, for this
reason: I think Althusser, clearly or unclearly, was on to a very profound,
very powerful, and highly problematical methodological insight when he
described social formations or phenomena as "overdetermined." Your
quite different use of the term loses that power, profundity, and
methodological novelty, reducing the notion to a rather familiar one that has
long been known and used in the social sciences, particularly in functionalist
sociology. It is at least worth trying to recapture the original meaning, in
order to see whether there is something of philosophical value in it worth
preserving. (A similar fate has been suffered by Durkheim's concept of anomie
as well as by the notion of ideology).

The notion
of overdetermination is introduced by Freud, as you note, with appropriate

references),
in order to deal with certain problems in the Interpretation of dreams.

As a
result of what Freud calls condensation and displacement in the dream-work, the

symbolism
or meaning of dreams becomes highly compressed.

Through
processes of association, certain symbols or elements of the dream may take on
several quite discrete and not naturally related meanings in addition, a
certain meaning may turn up in several different elements of the dream.
Although Freud on occasion offers some highly tentative physiological
speculations about the mechanisms of association (including, for example, the
suggestion that thoughts running along spatially contiguous nerve-pathways may
thereby become associated together), he clearly concluded on the basis of his
clinical observations that no useful generalizations could be made about the
specific patterns of association. A patient might, for example, associate
"leaving treatment" with the "leaves of a book", because at
the moment when he was leafing through the book he was worrying about whether
to leave treatment. In the dream, leaves falling from a tree might come to
stand for both the activity of leafing through the book (which, perhaps, was a
gift from someone whom he missed) and the prospect of leaving treatment.
Another patient might associate the leaves of a book with taking a leave of
absence from his job, something he very much wanted to do. And so on. In the dreams
of these patients, the visual image of the leaves of a tree might be a a symbol
with several distinct significant meanings. To say that such a symbol, or the
entire dream, is overdetermined is precisely to say that the symbol has two or
several complete, adequate, satisfactory explanations, each of which is itself
sufficient by whatever criteria of adequacy of explanation one is employing --
to account for the content of the dream or the symbol. The symbol is thus in a
quite natural sense of the word, "over-determined." That is, it is
determined several times over. One can give a complete explanation of the dream
in terms of one of its meanings, so that nothing is left out, no loose ends are
left hanging. Then one can go back and give a quite different and equally
correct explanation of the same dream.

Let us
very clearly differentiate this remarkable notion of Freud's from two quite familiar
notions that play a major role in social scientific explanations in sociology,
economics, and other disciplines. The first is multiple causation (or, to use
your terms, multiple effectivity); the second is reciprocal causality, or
reciprocity. To say that an event is multiply caused, or determined by a
multiplicity of causes, is simply to say that not one but a number of events,
phenomena, etc, must be invoked in order to provide a complete explanation of
it. Or, sometimes it is to say that phenomena or events from a number of
different social spheres must be invoked, such as political causes, economic
causes, cultural causes, psychological causes, institutional causes, etc. The
key point here is that an explanation in terms of only one of these factors
will be inadequate, incomplete, and hence demand some enlargement or supplement
before it can be explained. For example, an historian attempting to explain the
particular course of the French revolution might feel the need to invoke facts
of the special and particular history of the French peasantry, in addition to
economic facts common to the French and other economies, in order to account
for the details of (or even the broad outlines of) that course. To say that
there is reciprocal causality, or reciprocity, between two events or phenomena
is simply to say that each influences or acts on the other, and also perhaps
that each then reacts on the other in response to the action of that others. Just
as multiple causality is invoked in order to rebut the claims of single-factor
explanations in the social sciences, so reciprocity is invoked to counter the
claims of single-direction explanations. Notoriously, the simple-minded "base-superstructure"
model customarily (and, of course, incorrectly) imputed to Marx is both a
single-factor and a single-direction mode of explanation. Modern functionalist
sociology, and also modern economics, decisively reject both single-factor and
single-direction explanatory models. That is not peculiar to Marx, and it
certainly is not peculiar to Althusser's reading of Marx. Max Weber, and
following him Talcott Parsons, offer explanations replete with multiple
causality and reciprocity.

Perhaps
the most familiar explanatory model totally embodying both multiple causality
and reciprocity is the original Newtonian mechanics. Each mass in the universe,
through the gravitational attraction that it exerts, has an effect on each
other mass in the universe. Thus, the behavior ([i.e.] motion) of a mass is multiply determined (by the effects on
it of every other mass) and that behavior stands in reciprocal interaction with
the behavior of each other mass. Note, by the way, the enormous power of
Newton’s claims.

He does
not say that some masses are multiply determined, or that some masses are in
reciprocal interaction with one another. He says that all masses are multiply
determined, and that every event in the universe affects every other event,
however remote. There are really only four ways one could sustain such a
universal claim. Either by appeal to some theological revelation; or by appeal
to some a priori metaphysical principle (such as that invoked in the opening
section of Kant's Inaugural Dissertation of 1770); or by appeal to an
epistemological principle such as the transcendental unity of apperception (see
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason: "Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding");
or by appeal to a methodological principle of the formation of theories. In any
case, it is illegitimate to move from the indisputable observation that events
frequently are multiply determined or in reciprocal interaction to the
conclusion that every event is affected by every other event„ or that all
events are in reciprocal interaction or, more precisely, it is illegitimate to
make that move without an explicit and powerful argument adequate to so
far-reaching a conclusion.

Let us
return to Freud. If overdetermination means a multiplicity of complete and
adequate explanations for a given symbol or dream, three questions immediately
force themselves forward and demand answers. First, how do we know when there
is more than one explanation, when, that is, the dream is indeed
overdetermined? Second, how do we know which of the endlessly varied and many possible
explanations for a dream or symbol are the correct one? And third, how do we
know when we have found all of the correct explanations of the dream, and thus
have exhausted its significance? Freud gives the same answer to all three of
these questions, and it is so important that I shall dwel1 on it for some time.
It is, indeed, the key to all of Freud's thought.

Briefly,
the answer is that the analyst is guided by the patient's associations to the
dream. As you know, the analyst asks the patient to associate freely to the
dream. In this way, the unconscious content that underlies the dream is slowly
revealed. In effect, the patient follows back along the pathways of association
by which the mind constructed the dream. In general, Freud thought, dreams are
triggered by sensory memories of events from the preceding twenty-four hours. These
memories are interpreted, compressed, distorted displaced, etc, etc, by the
mind, in the course of which long-repressed wishes and fantasies find a safe or
"acceptable" expression in disguised, symbolic form. Dramas, like slips
of the tongue and symptoms, are generally unimportant in themselves, but they
are indispensable doorways into the unconscious.

Because of
the purely adventitious, or accidental and entirely individual character of

associations,
it is impossible either for all patients in general or even for one patient in
particular to compile a dictionary, a lexicon, of dream symbols. A snake may
stand for a phallus in one dream, and for a man named King (e "king
snake") whom one doesn't like in another dream. The approach to the
unconscious is thus necessarily dynamic rather than static. It proceeds by way
of the actual associations of the patient, rather than by an a priori deduction
of the possible meaning of a symbol. Through the process of association, one
ascertains that a symbol is overdetermined, what the precise set of overlaid
meanings are that have become attached to it, and when the unpacking of the
meaning is finished and the symbol has been exhausted. Without this dynamic
process of association, the notion of overdetermination would be vacuous. There
would be no reason to suppose that a symbol was overdetermined, to way of
knowing whether an explanation of the symbol was correct, and no way to determine
whether one had identified all the meanings of the symbol or not.

There are
two points to be noted about Freud's theory of overdetermination of dream
embolisms First, there is no place here for what we have called reciprocal
causality. There is, of course, multiple causality (assuming, for the moment,
that we can treat meanings or reasons as causes -- more of that in a moment). But
the dream does not in its turn react back on the repressed content, or at least
not so far as Freud knew. Social theorists in general, and you in particular,
wish to make strong claims for reciprocal causality (or effectivity), and to
that extent, therefore, you deviate from Freud’s notion. Second, Freud speaks,
most of the time, not of a multiplicity of causes or of an overdetermination of
or causes, but of overdetermined meaning. Symbols in a dream have cognitive
meaning they refer [to?], they have what philosophers call intensionality. One
explains a dream by identifying the repressed wishes that find expression
through it. As Richard Wolheim makes beautifully clear in the opening chapter
of his invaluable book, Sigmund Freud's original formulation of the notion of
the unconscious, from which all the rest of his work flows, depends precisely
on the distinction between physical causes and meanings or intensional referring,
thoughts. (The point, you will recall, was that patients suffering from
hysterical paralysis exhibited limbs that were paralyzed over a physical extent
that did not correspond to any natural neurological, anatomical unit, but did
correspond to what the patient
typically a woman -- in an unscientific way thought was such a unit. So
she might have a paralyzed "leg," when the neurologists knew that the
portion of her body paralyzed did not correspond to a portion controlled by a
single major nerve, etc, etc.).

Having
said all this, let us now turn to the sphere of social phenomena, and ask how
and why someone might wish to Import the notion of overdetermination into it. I
suggest the following possible explanation. As detailed historical studies begin
to pile up, and in particular as the results and insights of anthropology begin
to filter into the study of western European history, the following sort of
problem is liable to crop up. Someone does an exhaustive study of, let us say,
a series of wildcat strikes and other outbreaks of labor militancy, in which it
is quite persuasively shown that the behavior of the workers is fully explained
by appeal to their objective economic interests (perhaps dialectically related
to the development of their awareness of those interests). Then another
historian plows the same soil, and produces a study showing that the behavior
of the workers is explainable in terms of certain traditions of peasant and
worker behavior, going back hundreds of years, and reinforced by certain local
religious traditions. Yet a third historian, drawing on diaries, letters, and
other such materials, produces a psychological explanation of the very same
behavior.

There are
at least four different things we might want to say about such a state of
affairs. First, we might say that the economic interests are the real causes of
the workers' behavior, and that everything else is merely epiphenomenon,
reflection, expression or effect of those economic interests. This, I take it,
is the vulgar marxist position. Althusser rejects it, and so did Marx. So too
does everyone else with any brains. Second, we might wish to say that the
behavior of the workers was multiply determined by economic, traditional
religious, cultural, psychological, and other factors. This is the position
most historians automatically take. You seem to take it from time to time in
your paper. The trouble with this position, in the present case, is that by hypothesis
in our imaginary example, each historian has provided a complete explanation of
the phenomena under investigation. Of course, if each had offered only a
partial explanation, if each had left same significant features of the events
unaccounted for, then we could infer that each explanation needed fleshing out
or supplementing by other explanations, and that would lead naturally to a
multi-causal account. Now, there are some historians (and same philosophers of
science and of history), who would deny that the sort of situation I have
imagined could ever really occur. There couldn't be two or more complete explanation
of the same set of events. Perhaps so. But 1 am pursuing for the moment the
thought that there might at least seem to be, and that we might therefore need
an especially complex methodological move to deal with that odd fact. Third, we
might wish to seer that in fact there was not merely a multiplicity of causes
of the observed events, but a reciprocity of causality, so that none of the
factors could be identified as independent variable and none as dependent
variable. The religious beliefs, we might argue, were both caused by and were
causes of the economic interests of the workers, etc etc etc. This too is a
fairly standard notion among historians and social scientists. Indeed, I should
think that it is, today, the dominant view [as you?] clearly espouse it in your
paper, along with the notion of multiple causation.

Finally,
someone (for example, Althusser) might wish to say something quite distinct
from these first three positions, something powerful„ paradoxical, and
striking. Someone
might wish to say that this historical event (and, by extension, all other historical
events) is overdetermined, not determined, not multiply determined, not reciprocally
determined, but overdetermined. How could this be? Clearly, natural events cannot be
overdetermined. But historical events are not natural events, and society is

not
nature, not even second nature. If society can be understood as a structure of meanings,
not of objects, and if we can make sense of the vexing notion that society is a
structure of meanings which are not to be identified with the thoughts in the
minds of any specific
individuals (without sinking into the Durkheimian mistake of positing a group mind),
then perhaps we can elaborate a notion of social overdetermination analogous
to Freud’s notion of the overdetermination of dreams.

Now, I am
not certain that this approach will stand up. But it seems to me highly
suggestive and original, and I would hazard a guess that it is what Althusser
has in mind. Two points, before I close this part of my remarks. First,
Althusser is well known for rejecting the "subjective" approach to
the study of society. Pretty clearly, whatever his reasons for taking that line
(his fight with Sartre, who knows --), he is never going to succeed in
defending the notion of overdetermination without some serious. acknowledgement
of the idea that society is a system of meanings, not a set of objects. Second,
we saw that Freud leaned on the method of free association as a key to the
overdetermination of dreams. What, in the study of society, takes the place of
free association in psychoanalysis? In what way do we discover that a social
situation is overdetermined what the actual (as opposed to possible)
multiplicity of determinations are, and when we have exhausted the unpacking of
a social situation into its component determinations?

It may be,
after all, that by overdetermined you really mean nothing more than multiply
and reciprocally determined. If so, there is nothing more to be said. But if it
is indeed so, then you must recognize that your methodological position is thus
far indistinguishable from that of countless functionalist sociologists,
anthropologists, and political scientists and also from that of standard economic
theory. After all, any system that can be characterized by a set of
simultaneous equations is correctly describable as both multiply and
reciprocally causally interrelated.

II.Production,
Circulation, and the Neo-Ricardians

The
preponderance of your remarks are devoted to the differences between Marx and
Ricardo (and the neo-Raicardians), with particular emphasis on the different
analyses of the relationship of circulation to production. I think you are correct,
both about the difference between Marx and Ricardo and about the difference
between Marx and the neo-Ricardians. What is more‚ I think you are right to
insist that this is a central difference. Without accepting your
methodologically powerful and unsupported invocation of the idea of "two
sciences," I will simply agree that this is a big enough difference to constitute
a decisive difference.

However,
as I read the paper, it seemed to ne that you never went beyond observing and
documenting the difference. You never presented an argument designed to show
that the Ricardian and neo-Ricardian theories, by slighting circulation in the
way they do, produce thereby an inferior theory. Now, don't start in with
"framework" and all the met of that. Don 't give up the fight so
easily! I think one can offer powerful arguments to show that the Ricardian and
neo-Ricardian theories are deficient, not merely different, precisely by virtue
of their failure to take the proper account of the rate of circulation. Let me
sketch one such argument very briefly (you will immediately notice at this point
that I get in way over my head. My apologies.)

In the
familiar, standard physical quantities model (to use Stedman’s term for it), we
are presented with a system of n equations in n2 unknowns, namely the n [?]

prices,
the wage rate, and the profit rate. One of the n prices is arbitrarily chosen
as numeraire, or standard of value, and set equal to unity. The system then has
one degree of freedom, and we can study the inverse relationship between the
wage rate and the profit rate. This, I take it, is what Sraffa does.

Now, the
attention has been focused on the so-called transformation problem, which it
turns out, when cast in the proper mathematical form, to have a relatively
straight-forward solution. (Needless to say, I did not find it easy or
straightforward, but I feel 1 must maintain the standards and conventions of
this new field into which I have wandered, and people like Pasinetti, Steedman,
Morishima, etc seem to consider the theory of eigenvalues and eigenvectors to
be about on a par, conceptually, with baby talk.) But to me, the real heavy
freight rests on that barely noted preliminary move whereby one of the n prices
is arbitrarily chosen as numeraire and set equal to unity. To proceed in that
way is, in effect, to say that there is no real money in the system under
analysis. There is an accounting system, but no one of the commodities over
separates itself off from the others„ becomes functionally divorced from
whatever use-value it might originally have had (as gold and silver did), and
thereby becomes, in the full sense of the term, money.

It seems
to me that in Capital, and even more clearly in the first three or four
hundred pages of the Grundrisse, Marx is insisting that the emergence of
money, and subsequently the transformation of money into capital, is neither
trivial nor a merely formal and stipulative occurrence. The emergence of money
capital requires enormous historical changes, of course, to which are conjoined
major psychological and conceptual changes. But in addition (their being merely
in the category of background), the emergence of money requires essentially a
fully-developed sphere of circulation, without which there could be no capital,
since any formal model of a capitalist economy that treats the sphere of
circulation as a mere accounting-world, a place of relative prices and hence
merely of highly complex barter, must be inadequate to the reality of
capitalism.

If I am
correct, then a neo-Ricardian model would be wrong, not just "in a
different framework or a different science." How would it be wrong? Well,
it would certainly fall to explain the emergence or money capital as such; it
would presumably be unable to give a coherent account of realization crises; it
would be unable to explain why problems of accumulation in different sectors of
the economy would lead to unequal development; and it would simply have nothing
to say about such phenomena as the fetishism of commodities. What is more, the
neo-Ricardian model seems more appropriate to a planned economy than to an
actually functioning capitalist economy. Its claim to serve as a model for a
capitalist economy would thus constitute an implicit assertion that a planned
economy is simply a more perfect, more rational form of a capitalist economy, a
claim that seems manifestly false and also rather heavily laden with powerful
political implications.

Finally,
let me simply report that I could not follow your mathematics in the last
several pages. It seemed to me, although I was unable to determine whether I was
correct that a dimensional analysis of the equations on page 66 would reveal
that the terms on the left hand side are of different dimensions, or units,
from the terms on the right hand side.

Well, it
should be obvious that your paper stimulated me to a considerable response,
whether fruitful or not I leave it to you to decide. Many thanks for letting me
read it.

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.